Writer: Kraig Wenman
Director: Allan Unger
Rom-com meets latter day Robin Hood, cinema’s obsession with glamourising bank robbers continues in Kraig Wenman’s disappointing biopic Bandit which dramatises the crime spree undertaken by Robert Whiteman based on a memoir co-authored by Robert Knuckle and Ed Arnold. Whiteman, who eschewed his real name, Gilbert Galvan, holds the record for the most bank robberies in Canada. Played by Josh Duhamel, Bandit really, really wants you to like him, it’s surely just a bit of fun, banks can afford it and he was a good guy really with a lovely wife and baby to support. This film may think so but maybe the bank workers who had guns waved in their faces may not find this story quite so harmlessly romantic as writer Kraig Wenman and director Allan Unger.
Imprisoned for a series of petty thefts, Galvan escaped from a low security facility and gets a job after buying a homeless man’s ID. Now Robert Whiteman, he soon joins forces with club owner and shady businessman Tommy Craig and begins bank heists all across the country. But his jet set lifestyle catches the attention of the police who Whiteman outruns for a long time but when he falls in love with a local woman, suddenly he has a family to protect and clues to his identity become harder to conceal.
Bandit is a pretty lacklustre affair, a prolonged love letter to a man that Wenman and Unger are so desperate to make you like with considerable introspection about his terrible life before and how much he loves his wife. Robert has a heart of gold, only taking money from organisations that can afford it to make up for his lack of opportunity. Except at nearly two hours, it is a premise that wears thin as the increasingly swaggering Robert spends the money on houses and fur coats for his wife as well as sharing his profits with the local organised crime boss Tommy. The willingness of Wenman and Unger’s film to properly address both the trauma that Robert causes to poorly paid tellers during the hold-ups or the financing of wider criminal activity is irresponsible and worse, often dull.
This misplaced sentimentality about Robert becomes increasingly grating with numerous jaunty montage scenes in which Duhamel adopts a series of disguises and demands money at gun point from over 50 banks. The only driver here is the police investigation, a stuttering side-show that tries to elicit some tension from the cat and mouse antics of Whiteman and determined cop George Synder, but the psychology is missing, even when the two men finally meet, the scene descends into a quipping affair between two unnecessarily smug men, neither of whom the audience cares for. After two hours of elongated storytelling, does it even matter?
Duhamel tries to bring humanity to Robert, giving him a kindliness and a true love for his family, but as his activities only served himself, it is hard to sustain the fiction. Instead, Duhamel is blandly cocksure, a man so certain of his invincibility and charm that even the chance of one big haul at the end puts Duhamel on autopilot.
There’s little support anywhere else, Nestor Carbonell has so little to his chief detective to be almost invisible, Elisha Cuthbert as wife Janice almost gets interesting when she gets involved in the crime but is soon side-lined again while Mel Gibson’s Tommy is just an expensive (albeit garish) shirt in a seedy club. Unfortunately released at the same time as BBC1’s more complex The Gold, this heist drama is comparatively weak and lacking in tension, trying too hard to turn a deceptive criminal into a folk hero.
Bandit is streaming on Prime Video from 22 February.
